Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/310

 tion), was built in 1688, after the death of both Penington and his wife, and partly with money left by Mrs. Penington for the purpose, on land which they had purchased in 1671. Thomas Ellwood [q. v.] and his father, who came from Crowell, Oxfordshire, to visit them soon after they arrived at Chalfont, were astonished to find them both garbed in sober quaker attire. ‘The dinner,’ Ellwood says in his ‘Autobiography,’ ‘was very handsome, and lacked nothing but the want of mirth.’ According to Pepys, who met Mrs. Penington in 1665, she was not always grave; the diarist enjoyed ‘most excellent witty discourse with this very fine witty lady, and one of the best I ever heard speak, and indifferent handsome’ (Diary, iii. 104, 121). Ellwood soon became a quaker himself, and an inmate of the Peningtons' house. For seven years he was tutor to their children.

In the end of 1660 and beginning of 1661 Penington was a prisoner in Aylesbury gaol, along with nearly seventy other quakers, for refusing to take the oaths of allegiance to the government. They were confined in a decayed building behind the gaol, once a malt-house, ‘but not fit for a dog-house,’ says Ellwood. Many like experiences followed his release. In 1664 he spent seventeen weeks in gaol, and between 1665 and 1667 three periods—the first of a month, another of nearly a year, and the third of a year and a half. The second and third terms he owed to the malignity of the Earl of Bridgwater, whom he had offended by not taking off his hat in his presence, and by not calling him ‘My Lord.’ He was released by the intervention of the Earl of Ancram. From Aylesbury gaol he wrote in 1666 and 1667 letters ‘to Friends in and about the Two Chalfonts.’ Soon afterwards he was removed to the king's bench bar, London, and, ‘with the wonder of the court that a man could be so long imprisoned for nothing,’ was released in 1668.

Meanwhile the Grange was confiscated with other property of Penington's father, and a suit in chancery deprived Mrs. Penington of one of her estates because she and her husband would not take an oath to verify their claims. But Mrs. Penington, who was an admirable manager of her own and her husband's possessions, soon purchased and rebuilt (1669–73) a small residence, Woodside, near Amersham. In 1670–1 Penington was detained in prison for twenty-one months on the plea of refusing the oath of allegiance. He was released by the proclamation of Charles II in 1671.

In 1675 Thomas Hicks, an anabaptist, published in his ‘Dialogue between a Christian and a Quaker’ certain misquotations from Penington's and others' writings. Penington replied to Hicks in ‘The Flesh and Blood of Christ … With a Brief Account concerning the People called Quakers,’ 1675.

The long imprisonments and exposure to prison damps and fare had undermined Penington's always weak constitution, and in 1678 he went to Astrop, Northamptonshire, to drink its medicinal springs. He wrote while there, on 15 Aug. 1678, an addressed ‘To those persons that drink of the waters at Astrop Wells,’ and a short piece, ‘The Everlasting Gospel,’ &c., 1678, addressed to papists. On his return through Oxford he wrote ‘To the Scholars that disturb Friends in their Meetings at Oxford,’ 23 Sept. 1678. In the following year he and his wife visited her property in Kent. He preached at Canterbury, and went on to Goodnestone Court. On the day fixed for his return he fell ill, and died, after a week's illness, on 8 Oct. 1679. He was buried in the ground at Jordans, Chalfont St. Giles, acquired in 1671. Letters of administration were taken out by his wife on 1 Dec. 1680.

Mrs. Penington died while on a visit to her daughter at Warminghurst, Sussex, on 18 Sept. 1682, and was buried beside her second husband. She left legacies to her son-in-law Penn, and to Ellwood money for building the meeting-house of Jordans at Chalfont. She wrote, in 1680, ‘Some Account of the Exercises of Mary Penington from her Childhood,’ with a letter to her grandson, Springett Penn, ‘to be given him when he shall be of an age to understand it,’ an account of her husband's imprisonments in Reading and Aylesbury gaols, and a defence of herself for not sharing them. The two last pieces were published by her son John in his ‘Complaint against William Rogers,’ London, 1681.

Penington had by his wife four sons and a daughter Mary (d. 1726), wife of Daniel Wharley of London. Two sons, John and Edward, are noticed below. Isaac, the second son, was drowned at sea as a lad in 1670. The third son, William (1665–1703), was a druggist in London.

Penington was a man of transparent modesty and gentleness, yet with much intellectual power. His early despondency gave place to a cheerfulness which raised the drooping spirits of many a fellow-prisoner. An epistle from prison to his children, dated 10 May 1667, gives beautiful expression to parental affection. His writings are subtle and profound, free from invective or controversial heat, mainly in the form of question and answer. Not without mysticism, they are yet eminently practical, and powerfully